Mar 29, 2010

Lossless audio support of Meridian


Thank to avs234 and his work Andless, from 0.15.0 Meridian supports lossless playback including flac, ape, alac, wav, wave pack, and mpc.

Some words to say:

- You can play these files as normal ones, but tags (and thus album arts) won't work because Android does not scan them. Meridian does not have its own tag parsing system.

- flac cues are not supported, because there is an integration problem with current cue system.

Enjoy!

Mar 24, 2010

Double version try - Pioneer and Conservative of Meridian

Today I published a new app on Market called "Meridian Player Conservative", which is essentially Meridian itself, but is more so-called stable (0.13.1 by now), and will update in lower frequency.
"Meridian Player Pioneer" is what "Noble" is, and will go updating in current frequency.
People don't want to be annoyed by lots of update, please use the Conservative version. If you don't care, you don't need to change anything.
Hope this can satisfy each kind of users more.

Mar 18, 2010

Why there're only few not-so-good apps with equalizer or extra codec supporting on Android Market

Android framework has a MediaPlayer class, which will do file recognizing, dispatching, decoding, rendering, and synchronizing for apps.
Most video/music player apps just call this awesome class, and it works as you can see.

However, if you want a equalizer or implementing your own codec, the story is all different.
MediaPlayer class does not support those features, and Android splits Java codes and native C/C++ codes into two parts.
Main functions of MediaPlayer is native code, and bound with the device using special signatures. Apps on Market have no way to change that, and pure Java code is too slow to process such heavy-loading work.

Okay, so some people say you can use NDK.
Yes, you can use NDK to make your own MediaPlayer --- The WHOLE MediaPlayer.
You need to write (or copy) your own code of recognizing, dispatching, decoding, rendering, synchronizing, and all other MediaPlayer efforts. Oh, don't forget to plug in EVERY codec you support, since you can't access Android's default decoder in NDK.

So what's the result? You can try Audio Player WithEQ and yxflash to see what they provide.
Believe me, they pay much effort and have very good tech on these app. But the quality says how this is hard to do.

Meridian won't go that way. Still waiting Android to publish a better solution for this.

Mar 16, 2010

Meridian 0.13.0 is released, with new widget and album art fixes

  • (Pro) 4x3 widget with album art
  • Button style settings
  • Fix customized album art now showing bug
  • Fix phone start-up f/c bug
  • App version number shows in preference, about page, and FAQ page on title bar
The new widget looks like below. Also, you can change the button style now (Only two styles so far though). Please do it from preference as you can see.

Mar 5, 2010

Meridian 0.12.0 is released

Change note:
  • Add insert after current feature
  • Fix ID3 editing not working bug
  • Fix media auto scanning not working bug
  • Fix bug that can't find media files in root folder of sdcard
  • Fix album not showing bug in genre view
  • Fix sorting problem in Browser
  • Fix customized album arts are not shown in album list bug
  • Fix video zooming wrong when come back from another view
  • Prevent Nexus One rotating video goes to white bug
Many people complaining about the update frequency (even after dropping to once per week), but well, you can just don't update it if you don't have any problem.
For those going to uninstall I can only say, go ahead. If you really don't like updates, Meridian is bad for you.

[Meridian] "Insert After Current" feature

After 0.12.0, Meridian supports a feature called "Insert After Current".
It is quite same as inserting into playlist in default Music app, but it uses PlayQ instead.
Basically, it will create a new PlayQ and shift to it automatically. The auto-created PlayQ is named "Now Playing (x)", where x is a sequential number.
However, if you add other songs into this "Now Playing" PlayQ, it will just be added into it, without creating new PlayQs.
Hope you guys will like it.